106                                     U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-1991

    Journalists who had spent months interviewing uniformed men and women
in the desert, sharing their snapshots from home, their mothers' homemade
cookies and their most private fears about death and dying, dreaded the prospect
of finding the names of those same men and women on long casualty lists.
    Nine hours before the Feb. 24 H-Hour that officially began the ground
assault, the canvas tent called the "Chapel of the Breach' at the desert command
post bulged with an overflow crowd that spilled onto the sands outside the open
tent flap. When the service ended, there was a last-minute run on the over-sized
wooden rosaries that hung on a nail at the rear of the makeshift church.
    Across the camp, in the large tent that housed the combat operations center,
commanders who seemed to have aged years in the months since President Bush
ordered them to prepare for war solemnly awaited the long-dreaded breach of
the minefields that would begin at dawn.       Most of them entered this war
shadowed by the ghosts of Vietnam, recognizing that the public perception back
home of political or military failure in the Persian Gulf would be disastrous for
the U.S. military.
    What came through that night, however, was something much deeper-genuine
anguish over the prospects of high casualties among their troops.
    Those troops had come from the Dart Simpson-M.C. Hammer rap music
generation, the first all-volunteer American force to fill the front lines of
combat.  They had arrived in the Arabian desert with their hand-held Nintendo
games, VCRs and color television sets hot-wired to tactical military antennae.
They left with the life-altering experiences that even a 100-hour battle imprints
on the soul.
    Boomer directed the assault into Kuwait from a perch atop a mobile
communications vehicle stuffed with radios.    Life was a sequence of stop-and-
-start desert travels as the headquarters rolled north toward Kuwait City.  The
general spent almost every waking moment on the radio telephones, listening,
commenting, directing.    When he wasn't on a circuit to someone, he was
huddled with his staff or other generals.
    For weeks before the assault, the ground forces had seen Desert Storm as
something threatening but distant--pink-tinted jet streams that criss-crossed the
evening skies as warplanes streaked overhead toward Kuwait and Iraq, booms
and rumbles of cluster bombs and daisy-cutters slamming unseen into the sand
beyond the horizon.
    But within minutes of crossing the minefields, the Marines and the war came
face-to-face.  The bleak landscape lit up with ghastly fireworks as U.S. missiles
and shells found Iraqi tanks and artillery, turning them into funeral pyres. Chop-
pers thumped overhead, Spitting missiles at Iraqis just beyond the next knoll.
Artillery fire flashed and boomed across the sands from every direction.
    At one point, Boomer's party of about 48 Marines and one reporter watched
a tank assault at one point on the horizon and a Cobra helicopter attack at
another.
    "Look at those black dots on the side of the hill," ordered a voice on a
tactical radio during one skirmish.  "If they're tanks or artillery--take them out."
    The response crackled: "They're artillery."